Regardless of the informality of the matches, the competition was often fierce and the skill on display in certain neighborhoods would eventually be considered “world class.” Commenting on the wealth of talent that derived from a single Maputo neighborhood, Vicente Lucas reminisced that “the neighborhood in Alto Mahé [in Maputo] could be considered a luxury [for us] at one time, because we were living at the feet of Coluna, Eusébio, and Hilário.”17 Abel Miglietti echoed Lucas’s sentiments: “I remember that when I was thirteen years old I played for a neighborhood team and I had as opponents Armando Manhiça, Eusébio, Carlitos, and my brother Justino, and many more who became famous because of football.”18 Apparently, this talent manifested itself at even earlier ages than thirteen. Indeed, according to a 1959 issue of Ídolos, “At the age of seven, barefoot, with sewn up shorts and ripped shirts, Hilário was the little idol of the group of his street. . . . Others always wanted him on their team.”19
If local practitioners connected with other players through neighborhood matches, their limitless imaginations and aspirations connected them to global soccerdom, thereby linking what Domingos has described as otherwise disparate “football narratives.”20 The names of the local teams that young players formed evinced these creative connections. For example, Hilário started out playing for a neighborhood team named Arsenal, in obvious imitation of the famous London-based club. Apparently, one of the local club’s founders had seen a clip of an Arsenal match during the intermission of a film at a local cinema; the neighborhood team even did the best they could to don red jerseys for matches so as to dutifully maintain tonal consistency with the English outfit. Hilário rendered plausibility to the alleged origins of this appellative replication: “In Mafalala, news from Europe arrived to us, in the bairro. . . . There was news. In the intervals of films, for example, there were bulletins . . . and information circulated.”21 But these emulative connections weren’t limited to European football teams. For example, clubs featuring the names Botafogo, Vasco da Gama, and Flamengo were also formed in the Portuguese colonies, in reverence to these three renowned Brazilian squads. And, perhaps most famously in this bilateral vein, in the 1950s Eusébio and a collection of other teenage players from his neighborhood formed Os Brasileiros de Mafalala (the Brazilians of Mafalala). According to Baltazar, a Mozambican footballer of Portuguese descent who played with Eusébio on Os Brasileiros, the inspiration for the formation of the club was as follows: “In that time, many Brazilian teams came to play in Lourenço Marques. Teams like Portuguesa de Santos, Portuguesa de Desportos, and Ferroviário. They had artistic football. We liked that type of football, and that was why our team became ‘Os Brasileiros de Mafalala.’”22 Individual Brazilian soccer stars also impressed young African players in Portugal’s colonies. For example, Nuro Americano recalled, “We received news about Brazil[ian] football via the radio. In fact, my idol was Gilmar, the Brazilian goalkeeper.”23 Brazil’s triumph at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, which marked the debut of a seventeen-year-old Pelé on the world stage, further extended the legendary status and popularity of that footballing nation and its assortment of superstar players.
If neighborhood practitioners dreamed about foreign clubs in distant lands capturing the world’s most prestigious soccer trophies, the prizes on offer for winning local matches were much more modest and mundane. Although a great deal was at stake in these contests—reputation, pride, identity, and, eventually, an opportunity to showcase one’s talents for metropolitan football scouts—prizes reflected indigenous residents’ limited resources in these colonial milieus. The most common spoils was a can of cashew nuts or, later, as the cash economy took hold, small pots of money, which players collectively generated prior to kickoff. Mário Coluna, who spent his childhood in the 1940s playing in the Chamanculo district of Maputo, recalled, “When local teams challenged groups from other districts, we bet cans of cashew nuts and whoever won took the whole lot. In those times, there was no clock and whoever scored four goals first won.”24 Rewards could, however, be more significant, or at least more varied. For example, Nuro Americano, who grew up playing on the island of Pemba off Mozambique’s northern coast, indicated that a bottle of rose syrup and five sardines were on offer for the victors of at least one match in which he participated.25
African Organization: Leagues of Their Own
Although neighborhood matches were a mainstay of suburban life throughout the colonial period, African players and spectators also organized formal leagues of their own, modeled on the Europeans-only squads and leagues that Portuguese settlers had formed. Initially denied access to these associations, such as the Associação de Futebol Lourenço Marques (AFLM) in Mozambique, due to racially segregative policies in the colonies, Africans formed their own squads and leagues, thereby democratizing organized football. In Mozambique, beginning in the 1920s and ultimately formalized in 1934, African players organized (and were confined to) the Associação Africana de Futebol (AFA), composed of more than ten participating clubs. In Angola, a similar initiative gave birth to that colony’s African league, though the association in that setting featured only roughly half as many clubs, while the association in Portuguese Guiné was even more modest.26
Portuguese colonial officials, unlike their French counterparts elsewhere in Africa, condoned these imitative leagues, deeming them innocuous and potentially even constructive. This type of replicative sporting development has prompted Richard Cashman to ask elsewhere, in regard to the growth of cricket in the West Indies: “Where does the promoting hand of the colonial master stop and where does the adapting and assimilating indigenous tradition start?”27 In the Lusophone African context, it would be difficult to discern an exact transitional point between these two processes, as, in practice, they were complementary, overlapping, and flowed seamlessly into one another.
In an effort to analyze this dynamic in the realm of cricket, scholars of the sport, including Fahad Mustafa and, perhaps most famously, C. L. R. James, as well as scholars of soccer, such as David Goldblatt, have interpreted the formation of indigenous associations—and, more abstractly, “traditions”—as “resistance” and “platforms for political struggle.”28 Yet, in practice, there was no political struggle, explicitly or otherwise, that flowed out of this sporting process in the various Lusophone African settings, even if nationalist leaders, such as Amílcar Cabral in Guiné, recognized that sport could be used to mobilize his countrymen for the struggle against colonialism and even formed a club with this aim in mind in 1954 in the capital city of Bissau.29 Regardless, it’s difficult to identify any tangible “platforms,” or roots, of contestation in these initiatives in the Lusophone colonies. Although many Africans who would go on to join the various nationalist movements initially played for the teams that composed these leagues and political discourse certainly circulated within these clubs, it would be misleading to characterize the squads or, more broadly, the associations, as loci of anticolonial sentiment. Eschewing the tendency among scholars of Africa’s past to locate “resistance” in seemingly every aspect of colonized life, I instead consider the indigenous leagues as intermediate stops at which African practitioners enjoyed the game and forged meaningful relationships with teammates, while the most gifted among them honed their skills to facilitate further sporting ascension. Indeed, it was to the constituent clubs of “native” associations that talented African players from neighborhoods throughout the colonies graduated. And it was at these same clubs that they would subsequently showcase their skills for scouts from the superior colonial leagues and, eventually, from the metropolitan teams.
The clubs that composed the African leagues in the colonies required from their players a level of commitment, a sporting discipline, and a sense of European-influenced formality, including mandatory jerseys and shoes, that were absent in the bairro peladas. In turn, these new behavioral and athletic emphases would serve players well as they continued to ascend the ranks of colonial soccerdom. But despite some novel elements of decorum, the football played in these leagues by and large continued to feature the improvisation and “creolization” that had been devised in neighborhood contests. Many European observers praised